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2. From Pictures to Yardsticks: The Colorful Transformations of the Tractarian View of Language
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2 FROM PICTURES TO YARDSTICKS THE COLORFUL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TRACTARIAN VIEW OF LANGUAGE In 1929 the reexamination of the color-exclusion problem led Wittgenstein to rethink the notions of logical form and logical analysis. A new version of these core Tractarian notions together with a new analysis of the colorexclusion problem appeared in “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (hereafter SRLF), the paper that Wittgenstein wrote for the 1929 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society. The arguments of this paper did not leave Wittgenstein satisfied for very long. Though it was published in the proceedings, he had already rejected it before the session, where he spoke on an entirely different topic.55 However, despite its short-lived arguments, SRLF constitutes a decisive turning point and it contains crucial ideas that determined the subsequent development of Wittgenstein’s thought. In the opening page of SRLF Wittgenstein gives a brief summary of the central ideas of the Tractarian account of logical composition. But he goes on to introduce modifications into this account that result in substantial transformations of the Tractarian view of language. He first states the thesis that complex propositions are “logical sums, products or other truth-functions of simpler propositions” (p. 29). As in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that “analysis, if carried far enough, must come to the point where it reaches [. . .] atomic propositions,” which are “the kernels of every proposition” (p. 29). He emphasizes that finding these propositional “kernels ” is an extremely difficult task, and that “philosophy has hardly yet begun to tackle it” (p. 29). He then poses the crucial question: “What method have we for tackling it?” (p. 29). This question serves as a preface to the first important departure from the Tractarian view. Wittgenstein now contends that there is no method of logical analysis that can lead us from 31 32 From Pictures to Yardsticks the statements of ordinary language to the simplest propositional forms (pp. 30–31). He argues that “we can only arrive at a correct analysis by what might be called the logical investigation of the phenomena themselves ” (p. 30; my emphasis). In order to elucidate the logical form of a representational system, we must begin, not by examining “our particular language,” but “by inspecting the phenomena which we want to describe, thus trying to understand their logical multiplicity” (p. 30). This move away from language and toward “the phenomena” is motivated by the color-exclusion problem. In what follows I will first examine the new analysis of the color-exclusion problem offered in SRLF, and then come back to the idea that logical form is to be determined by “the logical investigation of the phenomena themselves.”56 2.1. Let the Phenomena Speak for Themselves! In SRLF Wittgenstein argues that he made a mistake in the Tractatus by trying to reduce the relation of exclusion between two propositions to a truth-functional contradiction, “for there is a difference between these two notions” (p. 33). The color-exclusion problem is brought up to explain where the difference lies. When we attribute a color to a point in the visual field at a particular time, say red (“RPT”) or blue (“BPT”), our color attribution excludes any other. That’s why we find no place in our speech for the conjunction “RPT & BPT.” Although this conjunction is an admissible combination of signs in our language, it is clear “to all of us in ordinary life” that “RPT & BPT” is “not merely a false proposition” but “some sort of contradiction” (p. 33). However, Wittgenstein goes on to argue, it is a mistake to think that the inadmissibility of “RPT & BPT” can be explained through a truth-functional analysis that will reveal a hidden contradiction. For “RPT & BPT” to be a contradiction, it would have to be a logical product whose truth-table contains only F’s. But the mistake is to think that “RPT & BPT” is a permissible logical product at all, even if a contradictory one. “RPT” and “BPT” do not express two independent possibilities that, when combined, cancel each other; each of them expresses a complete possibility, a determination that saturates the logical space for color attribution : “The mutual exclusion of RPT and BPT [. . .] consists in the fact that RPT as well as BPT are in a certain sense complete. That which corresponds in reality to the function ‘()PT’ leaves room only for one entity” (p. 33). This is the reason why there cannot be a contradiction between one statement of color attribution and another: because when one is...